Related papers: A third strike against perfect phylogeny
Phylogenetic networks are a special type of graph which generalize phylogenetic trees and that are used to model non-treelike evolutionary processes such as recombination and hybridization. In this paper, we consider {\em unrooted}…
Reconciling a gene tree with a species tree is an important task that reveals much about the evolution of genes, genomes, and species, as well as about the molecular function of genes. A wide array of computational tools have been devised…
Stanley and Odlyzko proposed a method for greedily constructing sets with no 3-term arithmetic progressions. It is conjectured that there is a dichotomy between such sequences: those that have a periodic structure as the sequence satisfies…
One of the main aims in phylogenetics is the estimation of ancestral sequences based on present-day data like, for instance, DNA alignments. One way to estimate the data of the last common ancestor of a given set of species is to first…
Recently there has been renewed interest in phylogenetic inference methods based on phylogenetic invariants, alongside the related Markov invariants. Broadly speaking, both these approaches give rise to polynomial functions of sequence site…
We characterize the compatibility of a collection of unrooted phylogenetic trees as a question of determining whether a graph derived from these trees --- the display graph --- has a specific kind of triangulation, which we call legal. Our…
Symmetry breaking for graphs and other combinatorial objects is notoriously hard. On the one hand, complete symmetry breaks are exponential in size. On the other hand, current, state-of-the-art, partial symmetry breaks are often considered…
We examine a mathematical question concerning the reconstruction accuracy of the Fitch algorithm for reconstructing the ancestral sequence of the most recent common ancestor given a phylogenetic tree and sequence data for all taxa under…
It is common in phylogenetics to have some, perhaps partial, information about the overall evolutionary tree of a group of organisms and wish to find an evolutionary tree of a specific gene for those organisms. There may not be enough…
Given two $k$-graphs $F$ and $H$, a perfect $F$-tiling (also called an $F$-factor) in $H$ is a set of vertex disjoint copies of $F$ that together cover the vertex set of $H$. Let $t_{k-1}(n, F)$ be the smallest integer $t$ such that every…
Phylogenetic networks provide a way to describe and visualize evolutionary histories that have undergone so-called reticulate evolutionary events such as recombination, hybridization or horizontal gene transfer. The level k of a network…
The perfect phylogeny mixture (PPM) model is useful due to its simplicity and applicability in scenarios where mutations can be assumed to accumulate monotonically over time. It is the underlying model in many tools that have been used, for…
Let $\mathcal{T}$ be an unrooted binary tree with $n$ distinctly labelled leaves. Deriving its name from the field of phylogenetics, a convex character on $\mathcal{T}$ is simply a partition of the leaves such that the minimal spanning…
We study the complexity of the problem of searching for a set of patterns that separate two given sets of strings. This problem has applications in a wide variety of areas, most notably in data mining, computational biology, and in…
Tuffley and Steel (1997) proved that Maximum Likelihood and Maximum Parsimony methods in phylogenetics are equivalent for sequences of characters under a simple symmetric model of substitution with no common mechanism. This result has been…
The evolutionary relationships between species are typically represented in the biological literature by rooted phylogenetic trees. However, a tree fails to capture ancestral reticulate processes, such as the formation of hybrid species or…
Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that are used in biology to represent reticulate or non-treelike evolution. Recently, several algorithms have been developed which aim to construct phylogenetic networks from…
We propose the following simple stochastic model for phylogenetic trees. New types are born and die according to a birth and death chain. At each birth we associate a fitness to the new type sampled from a fixed distribution. At each death…
Given a pattern string $P$ of length $n$ consisting of $\delta$ distinct characters and a query string $T$ of length $m$, where the characters of $P$ and $T$ are drawn from an alphabet $\Sigma$ of size $\Delta$, the {\em exact string…
Kloks, Kratsch, and Spinrad showed how treewidth and minimum-fill, NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems related to minimal triangulations, are broken into subproblems by block subgraphs defined by minimal separators. These ideas were…